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Since making my 52 Popsicles New Year’s resolution, I’ve been staying away from the Crime/Mystery section at the airport bookstore. When I picked up Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award winning new novel, The Round House, I thought I was being perfectly highbrow.

But The Round House turns out to be a real potboiler. It tells the story of a 13-year-old Native American, Joe, who’s out to avenge his mother’s rapist. It’s both a coming-of-age story and a crime thriller. But like the best genre fiction, Erdrich embeds important issues into her narrative.

Through the character of Joe’s father, a tribal judge, Erdrich is able to chronicle the persistent injustice Native Americans have experienced since the earliest days of the non-Native legal system:

“Take Johnson v McIntosh. It’s 1823. The United States is forty-seven years old and the entire country is based on grabbing Indian land as quickly as possible in as many ways as can be humanly devised. Land speculation is the stock market of the times. Everybody’s in on it. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. As well as Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision for this case and made his family’s fortune. The land madness is unmanageable by the nascent government.”

Reading this, I thought about what I’d recently seen in North Dakota. While photographing the oil boom, I stumbled across a Native American family on the Berthold Indian Reservation. While the children played in the prairie grasses, below the surface gigantic drill bits assaulted the earth for miles.

– Alec Soth

“He stopped beside a marsh with the car windows rolled down and listened to the trilling cacophony of hundreds of red-winged blackbirds, and on the other side of the road the more dulcet calls of meadowlarks. He recalled with immoderate reverence his burgeoning love at age ten for looking at paintings and listening to classical music, the lack of mind in his pleasure. How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.” From “The Land of Unlikeness” by Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison, 2004 by Alec Soth

I’ve always been a dog person. I’m not anti-cat, but not pro either. On a recent trip shooting the Michigan Dispatch, I came home to find that my family had acquired Ollie at the Humane Society. My pride wounded, I met the beast with cold eyes. “This is my house, Cat.” (I refused to address him by the name I’d had no part in choosing).

But it was too late – Oliver had taken over my home. My wife and kids were smitten, of course, but it was my Labradoodle’s affection that stung. No longer interested in going to the studio, Misha spent her afternoons enthralled by her new master.

I’ve since wondered at the cat’s power to win over my family. It reminded me of the way women are so attracted to bad boys. But is it their ‘badness’ that charms, or their confidence?

Over the last couple of months of watching Oliver, I’ve come to admire his swagger. Unlike the desperate Lovadoodle, the cat is his own man, living in the moment. My greatest admiration for Oliver is his relentless curiosity and attunement to the environment. He’s aware of every open cabinet, every stray hair band.

I thought about Oliver while reading this week’s popsicle: The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison. The book is comprised of two novellas. The title story is about a 17-year-old boy that is obsessed with swimming. In the water, he’s himself. Men admire his brawn and women swoon over his tranquil confidence, but it’s all of no matter, he only wants to be in the water.

The story is entertaining enough, but I felt like I was reading a Penthouse letter in Field and Stream. I just couldn’t relate to the boy’s prowess. I much preferred the other novella in the book, “The Land of Unlikeness.” In this story, Clive, a 60-year-old Manhattan sophisticate returns to his childhood home in Michigan to care for his mother. An esteemed academic in the arts, we learn that Clive gave up painting when he was 40. “When I was a little girl painting never seemed to make you happy,” his estranged daughter says to him, “You were always worried about your gallery.”

After sleeping in his childhood bedroom for the first time in decades, something changes:

“Clive woke at dawn having lost his self-importance. He didn’t know where it had gone but it wasn’t in him anymore. His first thought was that the arts had gotten along without him for centuries and would continue to do so. In the night he had looked at the distorted moon though each small pane of beveled glass on the door out in the hall.  He had also seen a bird his mother called a bullbat or nightjar flying across the moon in search of night-borne insects. One had flown so close to his face the evening before on the patio he could hear the chuff sound of its wings. His thoughts were impacted by the idea that nothing looked like anything else, which gave a painter something to do through any number of lifetimes…He had every reason to believe that he had allowed language and thought to betray him, so it would be an immense relief to paint and abandon language and thought.”

Reading “The Land of Unlikeness” was a pleasure. In one scene, after reminiscing about a rendezvous in a ’47 Plymouth with his childhood crush, Clive talks her into recreating the scene for a painting (maybe Harrison should write Penthouse Letters). “The first farcical conclusion was that you shouldn’t try to paint with a hard-on,” he says, “Painting was relatively non-mental but not that nonmental.”

Clive’s transformation back to an artist might strike some as being a bit Hollywood, but I believed it. Listening to Ollie purr on my lap while reading my weekly assignment, I can’t dispute the possibility of old dogs learning new tricks.

“He grabbed the kid by the coat, rolled him over, roughly sat him up. The kid’s shivers made his shivers look like nothing. Kid seemed to be holding a jackhammer. He had to get the kid warmed up. How to do it? Hug him, lie on top of him? That would be like Popsicle-on-Popsicle.”
From “Tenth of December” by George Saunders

While preparing last week’s assignment on Building Stories by Chris Ware, I learned about another book in a box, The Unfortunates, by B.S. Johnson. Published in 1969, the box consists of 27 pamphlets that can be read in any order (except for the ones marked ‘first’ and ‘last’).

The subject of this fragmentary memoir was instigated by Johnson’s trip to Nottingham as a sportswriter covering an inconsequential soccer match. The city brings back memories of an old friend who died of cancer and an old lover who left him. The unordered pamphlets function like memories bubbling up in the author’s consciousness during his weekend in Nottingham.

While the writing in The Unfortuantes is excellent, reading it after Building Stories was a letdown. Part of this is due to the absence of Ware’s gorgeous artistry, but something else nagged at me. I found myself irritated with the narrator of The Unfortunates.

Johnson is a card carrying solipsist, and as such, wildly egocentric. When he first learns of his friend Tony’s cancer, for example, he complains that Tony and his wife didn’t attend the publication party of his new book: “I was annoyed, angry even, that he, and that both of them, should find any excuse for missing something so important, that its importance to me should not be shared by them.”

Johnson is adamant that art speak the truth. Though defining himself as a novelist, Johnson was opposed to fiction. “Telling stories is telling lies,” he famously wrote, “The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites.” Consequently, the pamphlets in The Unfortunates read less like a novel than like artful Facebook status updates from a depressed, self-absorbed acquaintance.

While reading The Unfortunates, I kept thinking about the George Saunders quote I mentioned in last week’s post:

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another… The writer… can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit… The black box is meant to change us.

Having felt that nothing “undeniable and nontrivial” happened to me while reading The Unfortunates, nor having felt like I’d had a popsicle of pleasure, I figured I’d give Saunders’ writing a try. I thought it would be particularly interesting to read the title story in his new book, “Tenth of December,” since it deals with a man dying of cancer.

I ended up reading the story on my iPhone while putting my six-year old to sleep. As his breathing slowed, I felt my own pulse quicken. Saunders’ story about a cancer patient who encounters a pre-teen oddball while trying to kill himself reads like a potboiler. I couldn’t scroll down the screen fast enough. But this isn’t to say that the story felt melodramatic. As we watch these characters collide, we are also witness to their scattershot interior monologues. These voices felt just as honest as anything Johnson wrote in The Unfortunates.

In an interview with the New Yorker about his “Tenth of December” story, Saunders explained what he was looking for with these voices:

Lately I find myself interested in trying to find a way of representing consciousness that’s fast and entertaining but also accurate, and accounts, somewhat, for that vast, contradictory swirl of energy we call “thought,” and its relation to that other entity, completely unstable and mutable, that we put so much stock in and love so dearly, “the self.” That is, of course, an impossible task, the mind being so vast and prose being so inadequate. But it seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that’s durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

This seems very similar to what Johnson was looking for with his narration. While reading “Tenth of December,” I kept wondering what B.S. Johnson would have made of it. Had he read the story on November 13^th of 1973, would he still have committed suicide?

 

In last week’s Popsicle assignment, I quoted a critic of Louise Glück who wrote “Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry.” I thought about this a lot while reading the 14 books and pamphlets enclosed in Chris Ware’s epic graphic novel, Building Stories.

The main character (who’s unnamed) is a depressed, middle-aged, stay-at-home mom who defines herself mostly by her physical imperfections. If I have one frustration with Building Stories, it’s that there weren’t even more books about this seemingly uninteresting woman.

Much has been written about the wildly inventive design of Building Stories, but what makes it masterful is the way Ware creates such a compelling portrait out of these fragmentary pieces. After finishing the box, the nameless protagonist was so vivid I had a hard time remembering she wasn’t real. This is particularly remarkable since so much of the book deals with dreams and memories.

George Saunders was recently quoted in the New York Times Magazine saying:

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another… The writer… can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit… The black box is meant to change us.

I did exit Ware’s box feeling changed. But it’s also worth noting that the experience of reading Building Stories was extremely pleasurable. I was worried when I bought it that Building Stories was going to be annoyingly experimental and, well, too much hard work. But the only difficulty was finding my reading glasses (don’t even think about trying to read it without them).

Unpacking Ware’s box is a delight. It also complements and energizes the narrative in powerful ways. In a recent dialog at the New York Public Library with Chris Ware, Zadie Smith talked about the necessity of formal invention:

When I felt a communion with Chris, it was the idea that we are both moderns and that we live in a modern period and have an understanding of what that demands…You have to jolt people in different ways, in different decades and different periods. You can’t keep doing the same things expecting the same reaction because it becomes formulaic and they become used to the very strategies or they are not being challenged. You’d have to find some fresh way to approach them because people are ingenious about protecting themselves from reality. They find different ways not to deal with the real. Writers have to become ingenious to get through it.

If the purpose of my 52 Popsicle New Year’s resolution was to experience more pleasure, a side effect might be that I’m occasionally jolted into experiencing more reality – Building Stories gave me a heavy dose of both.

Alec Soth

“Even the person who lives like a dog still has some kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, “If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.”’ Abdul – in Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

For Christmas, Uncle David gave me Louise Glück’s book of collected poems: 1962-2012. I figured this book would be perfect for my first 52 Popsicles assignment. I was particularly encouraged when I read her poem Ceremony. Not only does she mention one of my all-time favorite poets, she also alludes to the pleasure/joy dichotomy I’ve been thinking about lately:

If you are so desperate 
for precedent, try
Stevens. Stevens
never traveled; that doesn’t mean
he didn’t know pleasure

Pleasure maybe but not joy. 

Like just about every other poem I read in Glück’s book, Ceremony is about the dissolution of a marriage. Worthwhile territory, of course, but the more I read, the more I felt the pleasure slipping away. “Very few lives are interesting,” wrote one critic of Glück, “and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry.”

Worn down by all the navel gazing, I picked up the book Uncle David had given my wife: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. The remarkable thing about Boo’s acclaimed nonfiction portrayal of a Mumbai slum is how much it reads like fiction. The narrative of these lives, however ‘bad’, is portrayed with an interior intimacy almost never found in documentary work.

As a photographer, I couldn’t help but look at Boo’s achievement with envy. Pictures feel mute next to the novelistic universe she portrays. This got me to thinking about the book’s cover. I find it curious that the publisher chose a romantic photograph, particularly when Boo writes in her author’s note “I quickly grew impatient with poignant snapshots of Indian squalor.”

As it turns out, the cover is a montage of two photographs from Chiara Goia and Alex Masi.  I like both of these pictures. But I’d rather not attach any photographic imagery (including the UK cover) to Boo’s seamless merging of novelistic interiority and documentary rigor.

– Alec Soth